Umberto Boccioni and the Material Atmosphere

In his ‘Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto’ of April 1910, Boccioni declared with reference to the discovery of X-rays, “What needs to be painted is not the visible but what has heretofore been held to be invisible, that is, what the clairvoyant painter sees.”

From 1909 on, Picasso and Braque had begun to respond to the new ideas about reality suggested by X-rays and to the possible existence of a fourth dimension. Connections were regularly drawn between the ether and the idea of the fourth dimension, a concept which will recur and be treated from different perspectives throughout this text. After Einstein and his theory of relativity, we think of time as the fourth dimension, but before that occult theories conceived of space as having four dimensions, rather than the three dimensions we commonly ascribe to it. This idea made its way into the artistic avant-garde, as seen in the poet (and friend of many artists) Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1913 book Les Peintres Cubistes (The Cubist Painters), where he states that the fourth dimension is “space itself, the dimension of the infinite.” In a four-dimensional conception of reality, our three-dimensional world would simply be a section of the four-dimensional world.

Thus, when Boccioni saw the work of the Cubists in Paris in 1911, he realised the power X-ray-like transparency and overlay had as a means of combining multiple viewpoints and perceptual experiences. His portrait of his mother, Materia (Matter) 1912, what can be read as angled rays or edges of translucent forms shine down or partially fragment the figure, and its rather heavy-set mass seems to refract into abstract forms as though seen through a prism. The painting Elasticità (Elasticity), 1912, is a further development of these ideas. The muscular forms of the galloping horse are depicted as flowing into one another, and are fragmented in a curvilinear way (in contrast to the angular viewpoints typical of Cubism) that creates doubt about where the form of the horse ends and what is around it begins. Differentiation of form and space — or matter and ether — is rather indicated through the use of colour, or in places remains very ambiguous. In Matter and Elasticity, Boccioni developed the attempt to visualise how he thought of matter as dissolving into and emerging from what had previously been understood as space, but is now conceived of as being filled with another kind of substance, the ether — or in Lodge’s words “the substratum of what appeals to our senses as matter”.

Elasticity’s fluctuating materialisation of a horse and rider moving within a refracted landscape might even be read as a visualisation of Lodge’s conception of the ether as “a structural field of great density as well as great energy and huge velocities…”. In Elasticity traditional ideas of form and ground have been dissolved in favour of an all over effect of multiple angles that express speed and the fleeting, yet figure a sense of the horse’s movement that the naked eye could not grasp, and is also quite different from the frieze-like still frames of Étienne-Jules Marey’s photographs of galloping horses (1880s). Boccioni specifically cites Lodge’s ‘electric theory of matter’ and his ideas about electrons and the ether, as well as philosopher Henri Bergson’s understanding of reality as duration, flux and continuity: “Every division of matter into independent bodies with absolute contours is a false division.” As Badino and Navarro remark, “For Boccioni — not by chance an enthusiastic reader of theosophical writings himself — the storage function of the ether, on which Lodge’s occultist arguments rested, became the vehicle to cross the borders between ether and matter. Unlike Cubism, in this case the mixture of past, present and future was not in the memory but in the bodies themselves: matter was ether condensed, and ether was matter vaporised.”